Resources

Release Notes

UiPath v2017.1 SP1

Release date: 13th November 2017 - 2017.1.6522

Documentation has been adjusted to reflect the changes presented to you below. The updated guides can be found here: Orchestrator, Robot, Studio, and Activities. As usual, we encourage you to suggest any changes you deem necessary.

New Features and Enhancements

Orchestrator

Security

The encryption mechanism for credential assets has been improved. We no longer use a static initialization vector, but rather generate a dynamic one for each entity. This helps you keep your information hidden from prying eyes and results in an overall higher level of security.

We have also added support for encrypting the configuration file (web.config), thus ensuring that nobody can use the information you store there.

To make password changes less complicated, a new window has been added, enabling the user to change the account password without needing any additional view & edit users permission. To further enforce system-wide security, users are logged out from all active sessions after their passwords are changed. All password fields now have a show password toggle, facilitating the writing of complex passwords.

ElasticSearch Authentication (X-PACK)is now supported, as the NLog target can be configured to contain the credentials for the ElasticSearch logon.

User Experience

To enable a better understanding of resource assignment, the type and description of Environments can now be edited. This also facilitates repurposing Robot resources, so that you can keep up with your ever-changing business needs.

Since complex business applications usually end up having a large number of automations, the Deploy Process window can now sort packages alphabetically, making it easier to find what you’re looking for.

The Start Job window now displays the status of the Robots you can choose from, minimizing the odds of choosing an already busy robot.

The Add Asset window now has a more intuitive interface, featuring two tabs, one for adding global assets and one for adding per Robot assets. For more information, you can visit this page.

To facilitate the identification of faulty robots, the Robots page can now be filtered according to the Unresponsive state. Also, you no longer need to have Robots in the available status to change their properties.

Easy access to documentation is an essential part of mastering Orchestrator, so the Orchestrator User Guide can now be accessed directly from the user interface, in the Options menu.

The license information that could be found in the sidebar will now be color coded and visible only when your Orchestrator is unregistered or on the verge of expiring.

Performance

The overall performance of all pages has been improved, to facilitate the processing of large pools of data.

The loading time of the Process drop-down list, in the Start Job window, has been optimized in environments with hundreds of processes.

Queue and Transaction Management

You can now share a more detailed overview of your transactions within your entire automation team by adding comments for each item. These comments can be used by those that usually perform reviews on transactions, when they are in the In Review status or even In Progress. More information is available here.

Building upon our previous release, transaction references can be enforced to be unique, at queue level. Coupled with the fact that the Transaction page search now looks for transactions whose reference starts with the input string, makes identifying a specific item a breeze. For more information on unique transaction references, please see the About Queues and Transactions topic.

The total number of In Progress items for each queue is now displayed in the Queues page.

API Changes

Streamlining your automation process is now easier, if you also consume the Orchestrator API. We now expose our Orchestrator API documentation through Swagger, and is available here.

POST requests return the newly created objects, and not just boring ol’ 200 OK messages. Moreover, response codes are more detailed when validation issues are found.

If you are creating a Per Robot asset, this artifact needs to contain an already provisioned and connected Robot.

Last but not least, batch logging is now supported through a newly added endpoint which helps you submit a large amount of logs with one single request.

Setup

To further help you customize your Orchestrator instance, the -downloadActivities switch has been added to the install script. It enables you to choose whether or not to download the activities feed on the local disk.

Robot

Free Robots have been dubbed NonProduction Robots, to facilitate the correct usage of different types of Robots and to avoid confusion between them. More information is available in the Robot guide.

Logging is an essential part of any software application that aids us all control freaks out there to sleep at night. The name of the machine has been added to each logged message.

Since understanding all the ins and outs of how Robots work is essential to becoming an RPA mastermind, The Robot User Guide can now be easily accessed straight from the Settings window of the Robot Tray.

Last but not least, the version number of the Robot is displayed in the title of the UiPath Robot Settings window. As a result, you always know if you need to update your Robot or not.

Studio

The Manage Packages window now supports version selection for installing and updating activities packages. Since all packages feature version control, and older versions are available via a drop-down list, it’s easier to keep track of the evolution of activities in relation to your automation needs. This dynamic version control, coupled with the wide range of activity package customization options, whether they are user-designated, local packs, or online, retrieved via the Activities Feed in Orchestrator, make it safe to say you’re fully covered when it comes to making your automation projects live long and prosper. More information is available in the Studio guide.

Improved Java Active Accessibility support means Custom Java components are now featured, enabling you to tackle bolder automation projects, regardless of the Java UI framework of the applications involved.

Direct connections to the UiPath Academy, latest online documentation and all the available release notes have been added in the Help section of Studio, so that you can have the needed resources only one click away. Finding information is so easy that you can’t claim you didn’t find what you were looking for!

Activities

Ensuring a high level of accuracy is always something we work on. As a result, we came up with a better cancellation handling system in all Orchestrator activities. This makes sure that all the cancelled jobs have a correct and insightful final status.

While we were in the neighbourhood, we also improved the Orchestrator activities error messages.

If you purchased regional licenses for the IBM Watson and Microsoft Text Analysis activities - have no fear, support is here! For more information, see their documentation here and here.

Bug Fixes

Orchestrator

Searching for a transaction according to its reference threw an error, if the queue contained more than two million items, and up to 100 Robots were adding items simultaneously.

In some circumstances, chart labels overlapped, on the Dashboard page.

Fixed an issue that caused passwords to be trimmed when creating credential assets. Now you can include spaces in your passwords.

To ensure that all started jobs are executed correctly until the end, the Robots that are running a job or are assigned to a schedule cannot be deleted until the job is completed.

The editable fields on the Settings page are read-only for users whose assigned roles do not grant them Write access.

The email, name and surname fields are no longer required for users in the database.

Fixed an error that prevented you from alphabetically sorting users according to their email addresses, in the Users page.

All the empty fields on the Audit page are now displayed as “N/A”, to enable you to easily track information and see where it’s missing from.

Fixed an issue that prevented Orchestrator from recovering from errors which occurred during startup.

A mechanism has been implemented for Orchestrator Azure deployments with app services that prevents duplicating notifications, abandoned items and other similar system jobs.

An invalid anti-forgery token error was displayed if Windows authentication was enabled and you tried to log in with a local user. Hiuh!

Various inconsistencies between similar windows have been repaired.

An error is no longer thrown when adding strings containing an apostrophe (') to a transaction's specific data, using the Add Transaction Item.

Robot

Fixed an issue that caused the installation of the default activity packs to fail if a Robot was connected to Orchestrator and the default packages were not available in the Orchestrator activity feed.

In some cases, if the Robot was flooded with logs, it stopped responding and displayed an out of memory message.

Studio

The focus was sometimes lost while searching for an activity pack in the Manage Packages window.

If you saved a workflow in a different folder than that of the project it became read-only.

Older versions of activities packages were not uninstalled if a newer version was specified in the packages.config file.

If multiple versions of an assembly are available, UiPath Studio always used the latest one.

In some cases, on Windows 7 machines that were previously licensed, UiPath Studio stopped responding if you tried to start a free trial and then tried to copy the activation error.

If you used the Screen Scraping wizard to create a data table, the Column Separator and Newline Separator values were not displayed in the Properties panel for the Generate Data Table activity.

The Activate option in the Element > Window menu of the Recording toolbars has been removed, due to its redundancy.

An error was thrown if you repeatedly installed and uninstalled the same activities package.

If the nuget.config file in the installation directory is broken, Studio uses the one from the user’s folder - %AppData%/Nuget, thus preventing the Package Manager from failing.

In rare cases, Studio stopped responding if you closed and reopened the Package Manager window.

The startup performance of Studio has been improved, in case you had many recent and favorite activities.

If you used the Data Scraping wizard to process multiple web pages, only the column headers for the first page were correctly displayed.

The Select Item activity did not correctly display all the items detected in drop-down lists.

The UI Automation Framework in UiExplorer now generates selectors with the element name and type for controls that do not have an Automation ID.

Fixed an issue that prevented the proper selection of Java 1.3 UI elements.

Activities

The following special characters can now be used as values in the Get Asset activity: +, /, ?, %, #, and &.

The Click activity with the SimulateClick option enabled can only be used with the CLICK_SINGLE and BTN_LEFT input types. Otherwise, an error is now thrown when executing a workflow.

Known Issues

Orchestrator

After upgrading Orchestrator v2016.2 to v2017.1, you have to restart the v2016.2 Robot service.

A duplicate reference ID can exist even if unique references are enforced at queue level. This only occurs if existing items have been postponed.

Using the Postpone Transaction Item activity counts as an item retry. Please take this into account when creating your queue workflows.

The Add Transaction Item returns an existing work item instead of the newly added one, if the reference contains more than 128 characters.

The repair feature of the UiPath Platform Windows installer is not supported.

Internet Explorer version 11.0.9600.17031 can cause some problems with Orchestrator's user interface if the Font Download feature is not enabled.

Studio

Running a HTTP request in debug mode throws an error. To solve this issue, the maximum log message size needs to be increased. This can be done by editing the [InstallationFolder]\UiRobot.exe.config file and adding the <binding name="ExecutorServiceBinding" maxReceivedMessageSize="2147483647" receiveTimeout="00:10:00" sendTimeout="00:10:00" /> line.

If a 2016.2 installation of Studio is done using a custom folder, upgrading to 2017.1 while Studio and the Robot are running causes the custom folder to not be removed.

The Windows 10 16.07 Anniversary Update changes the device ID of the machine it is installed on. This leads to Studio and Robot licenses becoming corrupted. To fix this, the license needs to be reactivated.